Internal Improvement

Famous quotes containing the words internal and/or improvement:

“A State, in idea, is the opposite of a Church. A State regards classes, and not individuals; and it estimates classes, not by internal merit, but external accidents, as property, birth, etc. But a church does the reverse of this, and disregards all external accidents, and looks at men as individual persons, allowing no gradations of ranks, but such as greater or less wisdom, learning, and holiness ought to confer. A Church is, therefore, in idea, the only pure democracy.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)

“The progress of society is mainly ... the improvement in the condition of the workingmen of the world.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)